Modern lifestyles are becoming increasingly more reliant on mobile communication devices, such as cellular phones, laptop computers, pagers, personal digital assistants, and the like. Advances in technology, services, and affordability have further given rise to a host of additional features beyond that of conventional voice communication, such as short messaging services (SMS), multimedia messaging services (MMS), enhanced messaging services (EMS), wireless application protocol (WAP) push messaging services, and the like. In conjunction with these advances, the affordability and ubiquity of mobile communication devices has served as a catalyst for the growth in mass distribution of unsolicited or unwanted messages (more commonly referred to as “SPAM”) by content providers, e.g., advertisers, broadcasters, promoters, etc. Not surprisingly, it is becoming rather burdensome upon users and operators of these messaging services to deal with the onslaught of SPAM without inadvertently affecting legitimate enterprise or intruding upon privacy rights.
Therefore, there is a need for an approach that can efficiently and effectively provide messaging gateway services.